n who had been tarred and
feathered lowered his voice and spoke with a terrorized whine.

"Thet feller I reecognized ... hit war old Hump Doane's own boy ... Pete
Doane."

Parish Thornton straightened up as though an electric current had been
switched through his body. His face stiffened in amazement and the pain
of sore perplexity.

"Air ye plum onmistakably shore, Jerry?" he demanded and the little man
nodded his head with energetic positiveness.

"I reckon ye're wise not ter tell nobody else," commented Parish. "Hit
would nigh kill old Hump ter larn hit. Jest leave ther matter ter me."

CHAPTER XXVI

The window panes were frost-rimed one night when Parish Thornton and
Dorothy sat before the hearth of the main room. There was a lusty roar
in the great chimney from a walnut backlog, for during these frosty days
the husband and his hired man, Sim Squires, had climbed high into the
mighty tree and sawed out the dead wood left there by years of stress
and storm.

As it comforted them in summer heat with the grateful cool of its broad
shadowing and the moisture gathered in its reservoirs of green, so it
broke the lash and whip of stinging winds in winter, and even its
stricken limbs sang a chimney song of cheer and warmth upon the hearth
that pioneer hands had built in the long ago.

Through the warp and woof of life in this house went the influence of
that living tree; not as a blind thing of inanimate existence but as a
sentient spirit and a warder whose voices and moods they loved and
reverenced--as a link that bound them to the past of the overland
argonauts.

It stood as a monument to their dead and as the kindly patron over their
lovemaking and their marriage. It had been stricken by the same storm
that killed old Caleb and had served as the council hall where enmities
had been resolved and peace proclaimed. Under its canopy the man had
been hailed as a leader, and there the effort of an assassin had failed,
because of the warning it had given.

And now these two were thinking of something else as well--of the new
life which would come to that house in the spring, with its binding
touch of home and unity. They were glad that their child would have its
awakening there when the great branches were in bud or tenderly young of
leaf--and that its eyes would open upon that broad spreading of
filagreed canopy above the bedroom window, as upon the first of earthly
sights.

"Ef hit's a man-child, he's g